My Dream Comes True

Crowded

When I was little, we used to sing a chant about bears in a bed. It was a counting game of sorts...and it went "Five bears in the bed and the little one said, 'I'm crowded! Roll over!' So they all rolled over and one fell out - four bears in the bed and the little one said..." You get the picture, right?

That's how life feels these days. Only no matter how many times things roll over, nothing falls out of the bed. It only grows more crowded. And I feel like the sheet, stretched as tight as possible to cover everything.

And yet, try as I might to stretch and reshape to get it all covered, I fail. Little bits and pieces start to slide out from under me, followed by bigger more substantial parts. Slowly, life drifts apart and I'm hustling to and fro trying to recover those things that have escaped my grasp.

It is this sense of lost control that pervades my mind. Even my dreams are fragmented, disjointed snatches of lost moments or anxious reenactments. I am starring in The Actor's Nightmare. Forgetting tests. Getting lost.

I am an overpromising underdelivering machine these days. I am late for work and lethargic and foggy when I get there. I forget to make calls. I can't find time for emails. The blog languishes. Family waits impatiently for me to join. Friends send out S.O.S. signals in the wake of my disappearance. I don't write. I don't read. Nothing is organized. Everything is frantic. I am everywhere and nowhere. I am responding but never enough.

It is like being lost in a crowd...taking up space, cognizant of yourself as existing. But so easily lost, discounted, nearly invisble. There but not. Taking up space but not really mattering.

Half-Birthday Wishes

Today is my half-birthday. Tomorrow, this moon child officially tips out of her twenties toward her thirties. Aside from generally wondering how I got here so fast, I'm trying to decide whether or not to panic about the 30 threshold. Not wanting to be 30 would indicate that I, in some way, would rather hang on to my twenties. Upon a little reflection, I see the past decade for what it is: a learning curve that was rather steep at some points. It's a curve I think I'm ready to see plateau to a new horizon. I look back on a lot of time spent puzzling out who and where I wanted to be, muddling through the initial throes of adult life and dallying with being different versions of me. And with just six months left, I'm feeling rather like maybe, just maybe, I have finally wrestled the demons. Like David, I have fought an exhausting battle through a long night only to come face to face with God in the morning. And now, I am at peace.

So on this half birthday, I have a few wishes. First, I want to spend a little time sending off my twenties...perhaps some reflective blog posts are in the near future. Secondly, I want to avoid dreading the 30 threshold. I'm not - in many ways - where I thought I would be by now. But I'm starting to accept that maybe things beyond my imagination will make my life so much more than my small-minded visions. And lastly, I want to celebrate. My birthday has been an overlooked and under-lauded event for some time now. I don't recall most of my birthdays, and the last time I had a party, there were roller skates involved. So please join me as I say goodbye and wave hello and dream up the proper fanfare for a lady at the ripe old age of 30 - we'll consider it an addendum to my resolutions. Suggestions welcome.

Happy Halvsies to Me.

Sliding Down Memory Lane

This morning, Dillon was quite insistent about being allowed to go into the neighbor's yard and make use of the playground equipment. Instead, we convinced him that far better playground equipment could be made available to him by trekking to the school where Mom works in the library. And while I confess that it was fun to watch Dillon laugh and play, I found myself hanging back and letting the others oversee his sliding and climbing. All while I did a little sliding and climbing of my own.

For whatever reason, it was easy to forget on that expanse of white sand and metal bars and plastic tubes that I am nearing 30 years old. Instead, I found myself in a swing, chuckling at the familiar heat of the flexible black plastic that had been baking in the morning sun. I squiged my toes into the sand and pushed off, pumping my knees out of sheer instinct. Then I laid back into the motion, pushing my feet up toward the sky, closing my eyes against the glare. The doppler of wind whistled past my ears, to and fro, and it felt so blissful, for a moment, I forgot everything except blue and sun and air.

Then I went over to the tallest snaking tube (wondering for a moment if I would get stuck inside). I climbed up the metal rungs and gripped the top of the opening and settled at the top of the incline. I pushed off, slinking through the twists and turns with surprising speed and popped back out into the daylight.

Dillon started to pinken, so we decided it was best to stroll him home. I cast a sidelong glance at the slide and said, "Just one more time." And, to my surprise, Justin and Eva lined up right behind me. We all slid through the tube, I imagine, holding our breaths, cloaked in our ten-year-old selves, before being dumped back out into the present.

Good and True News

Please welcome to the blogiverse some Good and True Things as penned by Jenn. If you're lucky, she'll eventually recount some highly amusing and slightly embarrassing stories of my earlier years, seeing as how we were fairly inseparable during that time. Hence the listing under Hometown Jungle Cats.

As the blogiverse expands, the world gets a little smaller, bringing all of us far-flung friends a little closer together. And that's a good thing.

I'm It

Pen tagged me because she doesn't know enough weird stuff about me, so she needs to know seven new things. Here goes:

1. I have a nearly photographic memory. In a recent meeting, I was able to recall (and name out loud to the group) the first and last names of 20 people I had just met. I used to be able to remember answers on tests by visualizing the location of the answer on the page in my notes.

2. I almost always pick a good wine from the wine list. I know almost nothing about wines, but I can usually look at the list and know which one will be good.

3. Sometimes, I find reading a book jacket as satisfying as reading the book. I love book jacket copy. I like to get on amazon.com and troll around, reading the book descriptions. It's like speed-reading.

4. For the longest time, I refused to eat olives. I swore did not like olives. Recently, I rediscovered olives. The other day, I was eating kalamatas out of a jar with a spoon.

5. When I was little, I had an imaginary friend. He looked like Johann from the Smurfs. And I'm afraid that his name was Gaddy. I have no idea why. Also, I had Holly Hobby wallpaper that I talked to - and grew so attached to, that I would not let my parents remove it, even when the glue failed and the paper would fall down on me in the night. I kept it held up with thumbtacks.

6. We have a feral cat that lives in our house. Inside our house. No one can touch her. We see her; we talk to her; we feed and water her; we love her. But, for all intents and purposes, she is like a wild animal. We never, ever pet her. (Except for occasions like the other day when we trapped her in the bathroom to cut matted hair off her back.) And her name, appropriately, is Shadow.

7. I abhor Pepsi. And Diet Pepsi. If I order Diet Coke in a restaurant and the server asks, "Is Diet Pepsi okay?", I will say no and order water. Diet Pepsi is like getting Patrick Duffy when you ordered Patrick Dempsey.

Passing on the weirdness...I'm not feelings so tag-a-licious about this. If you're jonesing to share seven oddities - you kids over there on the right, I'm talking to you - go for it.

Side Effects: Mercy

When I was little, Justin and I used to play a game we called "Mercy." Mercy involved bending the other player's hand back at the wrist in an effort to touch the fingers to the forearm - until the pain became too much and the player called, "Mercy!"

Mercy meant "Stop, it's hurting too much." Mercy meant, "You with the upper hand, please take pity on me." Mercy meant, "I can't take anymore." Mercy meant, "I give up - you win." Mercy was about finding a threshold, the fine line between tolerance and intolerance. Mercy was a plea.

And now, I find myself emotionally bent backwards. Just when I thought the worst was over, I feel my fingers touching my forearm, everything in my wrist tight to the point of breaking.

Mercy. Please, please, mercy.

Leaving: Part Five - A Room of One's Own

One of the things I've missed most about being home is my space. Granted, there's no place like home, and in home, I've been reunited with the room I grew up in. I spent many an hour there feeling like it was the one place in the world that was really mine. It's undergone several incarnations, from the Holly Hobbie wallpaper to the sunflower explosion of the 90s to its more recent makeover to nice neutral tones. But upon my return, I've found it hard to fit back into it - quite literally, between the tiny bed and the tiny dimensions, I can't physically live there comfortably. Currently, my possessions are exploding from overnight bags and boxes and littering every room in the house - and especially the floor of my tiny room, which now has only sparse patches of carpet showing so that you can step carefully through the rubble.

Crammed into my parents' house, I'm like a jack-in-the-box, stuffed without grace into a tight space and ready to spring at any moment if only I get wound up enough. As the days and weeks have rolled past, it's been impossible not to long for my house on Grace Street. Sometimes at night or in a passing moment, I'll recall my favorite details about the old apartment - the wide-board wooden floors and the places where the edges were cracking and splintering; the design on the black tin cover on the fireplace; the eerie circles of light cast upward by the living room chandelier that came from New Orleans; the thick grey plaster walls that held stains from hurricanes and air conditioner leaks; and of course, the giant many-paned windows that stretched up the walls and filtered in the sunlight, the moonlight and the view of my tree.

But there's something beyond the love of the old house itself in my longing for it. There is the point of it being a place that was mine - searched for and discovered totally on my own. And I belonged there. And I had solitude there. Though the solitude may have been too much at times and sometimes I looked forward to breaking away from it, there's a bit of me that wishes for a long stretch of quiet evening with sole possession of the remote control or the stereo or just silence if that is what I wished. Then there is the need for all my things: ready access to all my books (even if just to take them out and open their covers and flip idly through the pages without ever reading them); all of my CDs including Ray LaMontagne, Scarlett's Walk, Under the Iron Sea, and the whole John Mayer catalog which are somewhere in the storage bin; my photographs and teacups and the print of The Pink House that I love so much. Without the trappings of me, I feel a little strung out, unable to feel like much is really mine.

Just having turned 28, I think that I should be expanding out into the world. Instead, I feel like I'm shrinking, back-peddling into a former self that can fit into this house. While on some levels, it's been wonderful to reconnect with my parents and share their roof again, there are moments that I feel absolutely monstrous, like I'm going to Hulk-out and lose my mind. After so many years of relying on and only having to answer to me, myself and I, constant companionship can be stifling. Perhaps that's why I'm up past midnight most nights, relishing the quiet and the stillness. When, if I just close my eyes, I can pretend that when I open them, there will be the soft mellow glow of the downtown streetlights through the window casting shadows along the walls, all the way up to the cavernous ceiling while silence fills a space that is mine. All mine.

Help Me, Tom Cruise!

Saturday night, Justin rented Talladega Nights, insisting that I had to see it. I waffle on movies centering around former SNL castmembers in totally ridiculous plots. But Justin told me that it was hilarious, and seeing as how I had nothing better to do on a Saturday night, I caved.

The first ten minutes had me gasping for breath - they may, in fact, be the best of the movie. Aside from the hysterical saying grace scene in which Ricky Bobby insists on addressing his prayer to the sweet infant baby Jesus. All in all, it's a pretty good movie.

But the best part was that every one else went to bed and left Justin and me sitting there laughing, repeating the ridiculous lines back to each other. With him in the recliner and me on the couch, the two of us making jokes about our pee pants, I almost felt 16 again. And it was kind of fun, just for the night.

Taking the Long Way (or The UnPlan Plan)

Two questions most asked since my departure from Wilmywood:

1) Are you enjoying having some time off from work?
2) Have you found a job yet?

Please don't think these questions are mutually exclusive. I'm often asked them back to back.

Here's the thing: I have followed the plan to the nth letter since I was 12 years old. I choose 12, because that's when I decided to go to Berry. And major in Communication. When I was 14, I started high school on the college prep track. I joined clubs. I did extracurricular activities. When I was 15, I took the PSAT. When I was 16, I took the SAT. Took it again when I was 17 and took the ACT, too - just for good measure. At 17, I was accepted to Berry and awarded a scholarship. At 18, I went to college.

In those four years of college, I stayed in the major I declared as a 12-year-old, and added three minors to it. I got a second scholarship in theatre. I worked at Oak Hill and was made supervisor. I applied to grad school. I did an internship. I graduated and went to Wilmywood. I got a job. At 24, I earned my MFA. And I stayed in my job, working full-time.

I have followed The Plan so very carefully. And now, for a few weeks of my life since I was 12, I don't have a plan. And it's a national emergency. I know it's what people think to ask, but I wish they wouldn't ask it like they're panicked for me. Like the time is ticking and the bank account is growing smaller.

There's a plan for everything. Your cell phone. Your retirement. The possibility that your workplace comes under a terrorist attack. Perhaps it's time to be liberated from The Plan.

On the way home today, I wasn't paying attention and missed the interstate I was supposed to take and ended up taking another way home. A longer way that I probably haven't driven since college. I missed a bypass later and ended up driving through a quaint little downtown. A drive that should've taken me an hour and a half tops, crested to just over two hours. But you know what? It was okay.

Sometimes, you have to throw the map out the window. Sometimes you have to get lost. Sometimes you just have to keep driving even though you don't know where you're going. Sometimes, the future - that far off destination- is too far away. Sometimes, right now, with the windows down and Keane turned up, is enough. It's enough.

Here's to the UnPlan Plan.

The Shelter of My Single Bed

Until I was about 25 years old, I slept in a single bed. When we first moved into this house, I wasn't even sleeping in a "big girl bed" yet, so I naturally graduated to a little white-frame twin bed one or two years after we moved in here. My room is tiny and could never accommodate a bigger bed - not even an upgrade to a double.

When Anna went away to college, everyone asked me if I would move into the bigger bedroom. But I staunchly stayed in my little, little room. When Justin went away to college, the question came up again. And again, I stayed in the little room with the little bed.

Since then, I've gone away to college and spent four years on the standard dorm-issue single bed. When I moved to Wilmywood, I took one half of the bunkbeds my brother and sister shared once upon a time. I slept on that bed almost all the way through grad school.

But then, J. brought me a spare queen-sized mattress that his parents had recently replaced. I soon grew accustomed to having plenty of room to lay sideways or sprawl out. And factor in plenty of room for Kudzu to lay at the foot of the bed (although he typically chooses to lay on top of me).

So now I'm back, and I thought for sure that I could happily return to the little bed. In fact, I cannot. Apparently I like to roll up in the sheets to the left, and that puts the sheets sliding down between the bed and the wall and me holding on to approximately four inches of leftover sheet when I wake up the next morning. And if Kudzu chooses to sleep with me, he has no choice but to sleep on me like fifty pounds of dead weight, and I cramp from not being able to turn over or wake up with a sore back from where he's taken up residence on me while I'm sleeping on my stomach. Like everything else about me since I've left home, my sleeping habits have changed so much that I can't seem to fit them back into the mold.

I've finally drifted down the hall to Justin's bed. And like Goldilocks, if I find that it's not just right, Anna's is next.

Leaving: Part Two

Last night, watching American Idol, I couldn't help thinking during the recap of last week's show that I had watched it in my apartment. Particularly, the few seconds of Annie Lennox's cover of "Bridge Over Troubled Water" that nearly brought me to my knees last week.

The literal translation of deja vu is already seen. And we use it to talk about that feeling of having experienced something before. The recap wasn't so much a sense of deja vu, as it was that I had literally seen the show before. But at the same time, it was strange to be trying to match up the first experience with the second. With the window for saying "this time last week I was in Wilmywood" closing up fast, the opportunity for deja vu is going out that window.

But is there a word for the confusion of seeing something out of context? I've seen several cars this week that look like those of office mates and friends from Wilmywood. For a moment, the lines between time and place are obliterated, and I'm left standing there wondering where I am. Similarly, I see things here that belong in other parts of my life. Like Jackson Street, where a long-ago boy I liked used to live. I notice it - something in my brain flagging its importance - and deliberate briefly about whether or not it belongs in the present.

The neatly compartmentalized eras of my life are escaping their confines and blurring together. And without a clear direction - no address, no job, nothing to ground me - I feel like I'm just swirling around in all my different selves, able to be one or the other at any given moment.

Inquiring Minds Want to Know

The illustrious Megs has kindly consented to interview me (because I kind of asked her to). And now, you have the dubious honor of asking me to do the same. Here's how:

1. Leave me a comment saying, "Interview me."
2. I will respond by emailing you five questions of my choice.
3. Then, you should update your blog with the answers to the questions.
4. You have to include this explanation and an offer to interview someone else in the same post.
5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you get to ask them five questions.

Number 1: Quick! The house is on fire! Excepting the obvious people & pets, what 5 things do you take?
1. Fuzzy Fur, the well-loved if not somewhat dishevled teddy bear I've had since I was six
2. Photo albums - I'm counting these as one gigantic armload
3. My black BCBG heels - don't tell the other shoes, but they're my favorites
4. The laptop, since it's got a lot of life history living in it
5. The original Clue movie poster Tom bought me - irreplacable!

Number 2: What is the best or weirdest reconnection you have made via the internet?
Hmm. I'd have to say the best reconnections have been the blogs. I've been able to keep in touch with some folks from high school and grad school via the blogs - it's nice to be part of the little e-neighborhood.

Number 3: What is your most hated word?
I really, really hate the word "pus." There is no context in which the word pus is good. It sounds horrible. It looks horrible on the screen. It is horrible. Oooh. Shudder. Pus.

Number 4: Tell me something funny you've never blogged before.
When I was freshman in high school, I was playing softball in P.E. with a Pakistani kid when we collided and he broke my nose. I was forced to sit in the field house with a 50-gallon garbage bag full of ice draped over my face while the coach called my mom to "come take a look" even though he didn't think it was broken. (This used to be a story I would tell like a party trick.)

Number 5: What is your all-time favorite song?
Oh, my, this is a very hard question. I'd have to say...well, I'm thinking of songs that I can hear over and over again without tiring of them. And a song that makes me feel warm and happy. Hmm. I guess I'm going to say - despite my love affair with John Mayer - "Tidal Wave" by David Gray, but if you asked me next week, it's probably say something different.

RuMANations

A girlie-girl prone to crushes since, oh, I don't know, birth, I've always had some celebrity that I secretly pined for - or not so secretly wrote on every notebook I carried. According to the same journal that charted my musical tastes, I've had crushes on the following celebrities:

Dean Cain (of Lois & Clark fame) * Chipper Jones (of the Atlanta Braves) * Adam Duritz (of Counting Crows) * Harrison Ford * Colin Firth * Michael Schoeffling (from Sixteen Candles, although my crush had more to do with the little-known Wild Hearts Can't Be Broken) * Hugh Jackman * Joshua Jackson * John Mayer...and I'm sure there were many, many more whose names I was smart enough to not catalog for future embarrassment.

But far more embarrassing than any of my past crushes is that, I must confess, I still get celebrity crushes. And they seem to come in threes. My current list of crushes includes:

*James Purefoy - British and delicious. If you missed HBO's Rome, you missed his incredibly witty and sexy portrayal of Mark Antony, you missed out. He's just rugged. And wicked. Great voice, too. A guy's never looked so hot shoving a sword into his gullet.

*Christian Bale - I know he was popular among my friends (a.k.a. NIKI!) when he was in Swing Kids. I thought he was cute then, but now? He's smoldering. He's got that mysterious quality. Best Bruce Wayne ever (and with the worst script of all of them).

*Mr. Armani - I tried to find out this guy's name, and the best I can do is find one site that names him Andrew Cooper. But I don't think that's right. So we'll just call him Mr. Armani. He's spearheading the spring campaign for the label, and well, let's just say I'm glad we get GQ in the office so that I could tear the ads out and pin them to my billboard. Plus the latest issue has Christian Bale on the cover - bonus!

Once a crusher, always a crusher.

Loose Lips Sink Ships

I've never been able to keep my mouth shut. It's a rather famous family story that when my brother made the eighth grade basketball team, he left me home alone to go celebrate with his best friend Andrew and admonished me not to tell my mother when she arrived home. But when the time came, try as I might, I couldn't lie, my lips quirking up on both sides as I tried to sound miserable and say that he hadn't made the team. I don' remember what Justin said when he found at I'd told - I guess he knew better the next time.

If I were in Harry Potter, I'd never be anyone's secret-keeper. Not because I'm not loyal. On the contrary: I'm loyal to a fault, more willing than most to sacrifice myself for the comfort of others. But what I know and - possibly more intensely - what I feel, I must tell. And even when I have the best intentions of not telling, the words come tumbling out of my mouth before I even know what's happening.

Perhaps all the secretiveness was taken up by my sister, who is classically trained in evasion tactics. If she has no interest in telling you something, she is not easily tricked into doing so. I, on other hand, will tell my life's secrets with only the slightest provocation. I find myself telling people things all the time that I will think only later that I should've kept to myself.

I wish I were more secretive and mysterious, but I am the proverbial open book. I seem to have no control over the emotions that play across my face, and when I try to exert control, it's so unnatural that people can easily discern that I'm trying to hide something. And when one word would do, I overcompensate with ten. I'm like Bridget Jones with my chronic verbal diarrhea.

Even when I admonish myself again and again and again that I will not say something aloud, I will inevitably end up scolding myself inwardly when I'm mid-story with someone. And not a lover of conflict, I often find myself telling the wrong things to the wrong people. In order to exorcise myself of what I'm feeling, I tell Person A when I should really be addressing things with Person B. Some people suffer in silence, but I find that I must suffer aloud. And one of these days, my runaway tongue is going to get me in trouble.

While some may find this sort of open-facedness charming, I find it often comes along with a fair measure of regret when I realize that I've said too much. And there is something to be said for reservation when it's appropriate, as it keeps one from being altogether inappropriate. My loose tongue instead seems to plague me. It's rather a character flaw, I find, to need to tell my story all the time. Even now, I'm wondering if I've said too much.

The Kudzu Jungle Five

Since Meg so kindly tagged me to reveal five facts about myself, I'm obliging. And they're, as she says, a little left of normal because that's so much more interesting.

1. I have not played a video gaming system since the Atari 2600. We never upgraded to Nintendo or Sega or Playstation. I've played the occasional handheld game, but my skills have never moved beyond the old rubbery black joystick with the single red button.

2. I love hats. Not that awful thing that Camilla Parker Bowles wore in her wedding to Prince Charles. But I wish that we all still wore fantastic hats like they did in the 40s and 50s. I have a hat face. I can wear just about any hat and it looks good on me. It's a sadly underutilized asset of mine.

3. I love Elvis. I love the cheesy movies he made - especially Blue Hawaii, Viva Las Vegas and G.I. Blues - and I love his music. I really love his iconic status and how there's something inherently classic and wonderful and at the same time over-the-top and tacky about it. I have a blue suede coffeetable book about Elvis. And a lunchbox.

4. I rub my feet together when I go to sleep. Usually, I'm laying on my stomach and I rub the left foot over the sole of the right. Until a few years ago, I didn't know that my mother does the same thing. And so did her mother.

5. I have recurring dreams. In one, my parents have a fourth child. His name is Samuel, but we call him Sam. I am four when he is born, and I am always sitting on the couch at my grandparents' house and holding him in my lap while everyone gives me too many instructions about how to hold him properly. In another, I am playing basketball and it's the state tournament (which my high school team went to in real life) and it's either me now that's playing - 10 years out of practice - or it's me then but I've forgotten some essential element of my uniform.

I know most of my fellow bloggers have been tagged, but I invite my non-blogger readers to leave their own weirdness in the comments. Think of it as a weirdness confessional of sorts.

The Sound of Music: A Personal History

Let's start at the very beginning. It's a very good place to start.

*1965 - My parents go to see the movie in the theater on one of their early dates. The thought of my father sitting through this in the theater is...laughable. But it must've been a good date. They married two years later. And then 10 years later, there was me.

*1984 - I figure I was about 5 when I started listening to the record we had of the soundtrack. I clearly remember sitting in Anna's room with its yellow and white shag carpet and striped daisy wallpaper and trying to learn the words to "Sixteen Going on Seventeen." And thus began my obsession with song lyrics.

*1980s - For a long time, one of the channels would run the movie every year at Christmas or just after. It was always a big family event to watch together - we were easily entertained.

*1993/4 - Somewhere along in here I got the movie on VHS. And I also developed a terrible crush on Christopher Plummer. Captain Von Trapp is HOT.

*1997 - Our high school put on the musical as the spring production. Jenn was totally robbed of playing Leisl by this horrible girl who thought she was headed for Broadway. Instead, Jenn and Allison were cast as backup nuns. Oh, the agony. It led to many, many inappropriate nun jokes for which we will certainly burn in hell.

*1998-2001 - I learned in college that I could use this movie to study. No, really. I would let the movie play while I was studying for tests and then I would listen to the soundtrack on the way to class. Excellent memory trick. It's the only way I made it through Dr. McKee's Public Relations Theory course - I had confidence in me.

*2002 - Hoang-Anh discovered my love of The Sound of Music. There was a communal viewing. And possibly a sing-along. But I'm not confirming anything.

*2006 - At Christmas, Mom and I happened to catch the movie on TV. We had forgotten how cheesy it is. Particularly "Something Good" sung by Maria and the Captain after they declare their love for one another. It was so silly in fact, that Robert Wise chose to shoot it in silhouette because Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer couldn't keep a straight face.

*2007 - Excellent distraction to pass the time while counting the hours until meeting my nephew.

So long, farewell, auf wiedersehen, good night. I'm off to see the baby. Copious amounts of pictures from every imaginable angle upon my return.

Scooby Doo, Where are You?

It saddens me to report that the creator of Scooby Doo died today at the age of 81. He also did animation work on Disney classics like Cinderella and Peter Pan, but his crowning achievement was the sleuthing Great Dane and "gang." Scooby Doo was undoubtedly my favorite cartoon as a kid, and I admit to watching it a great deal in college - it used to come on the Cartoon Network at 2 a.m. before they only played weird cartoons. I was a little bit in love with Shaggy for a time. Maybe I still am. Rest in peace, friend.

Music Evolution

I've kept a journal since I was about six. No really. Six. I started in a little pink journal with My Melody on the front. Around age 9, I decided I needed a new journal with a lock (to deter snooping brothers), and so for my birthday, I received a purple ice-cream cone adorned locked diary. It never quite had the right feel to me, and I never journaled in it consistently. Instead, I kept a catalogue of lists that I updated with some irregularity over the years - favorite colors and who my friends were and what my favorite songs were.

I came across the journal one of these last times I was at home, and I couldn't help getting a chuckle over the development of my music taste over the years. And so, for your amusement, I give you the following favorites songs and bands of yours truly:

*July 1989, Age 10 - New Kids on the Block, Richard Marx and Paula Abdul

*February 1992, Age 12 - While I am pleased to report that I scrawled "I Hate NKOTB" in the margin, I also listed my favorite song as "That's What Love is For" by Amy Grant

*December 1995, Age 15 - "No Rain" by Blind Melon and "Ice Cream" by Sarah McLachlan. An improvement in musical taste, but my favorite TV show was "Lois & Clark."

*June 1996, Age 16 - "Time and Time Again" by Counting Crows. Here I wrote "Pie in the Hood" in the margin. I have no idea what this means.

*February 1997, Age 17 - "Elsewhere" by Sarah McLachlan and "Lovefool" by The Cardigans

*August 1997, Age 18 - Les Mis. Everything Les Mis. Enter the freakish obsession with musical theatre.

*January 1998, Age 18 - "Brick" by Ben Folds Five

*May 1998, Age 18 - "Wish" by Pearl Jam. I had just bought tickets for Lilith Fair.

*March 1999, Age 19 - "Northern Lad" by Tori Amos and "You've Got the Music in You" by New Radicals. It had one hit wonder written all over it.

*May 2000, Age 20 - "Dancing Virginia" by Jump, Little Children and "Anybody Home" by Our Lady Peace

*June 2001, Age 21 - "Space Between" by Dave Matthews Band and "Tiny Dancer" by Elton John. Ironically, this was before grad school, and I have no recollection of why I might have noted that song...musical clairvoyance perhaps?

At least this list shows improvement. But I confess that I thought of it because my brother and I were talking at The Grill about the first tapes we remember getting as kids. His? The Ghostbusters Soundtrack and Tracy Chapman's Fast Car. Mine? Lionel Richie's Dancing on the Ceiling. There was nowhere to go from there but up - no pun intended.

The Ghost of Christmas Past

When my sister, the eldest of the three of us, was just six weeks old, my mother's mother was killed in a tragic accident. As a child, I knew her only from the picture in my grandparents' house of her standing behind her father as he held my sister. Over the years, my mother and I have talked about her a lot - how she made excellent cakes and loved shoes and had the kind of hair everyone envied and was just five feet tall but full of spunk. And still I do not know her, but I think of her often and love her in my own way, as an equal an opposite reaction to my grief over her absence.

This summer my mother and sister helped clean out some things from my aunt's house and stumbled upon a bag of old eight millimeter film reels from their childhood. My sister took them to have them transferred to DVD. Emptying the bag at home, she also found a lone cassette tape marked as "Elsie's Voice" which she had transferred to CD.

Tonight she presented my mother and her sister with the CD transfers, still simply marked "Elsie's Voice." Both were overcome, and I was suddenly overcome, too, at the magnitude of the gift - the chance to hear their mother's voice again after it being lost for so many years. Sometimes, we have the strange opportunity to see our parents as ourselves. See them as the children of their parents as we are the children of them. In one heartbreaking moment, I saw her crying as I would cry myself, to get a gift so great as the sound of my mother's voice after the passing of time had made it a mere whisper.